"As head of the Food and Drug Administration,Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents
and battled Congress and Big Tobacco.
But the Harvard-educated pediatrician
discovered he was helpless
against the forces of a chocolate chip cookie...
..."I wouldn’t have been as interested
in the question of why we can’t resist food
if I didn’t have it myself,” he said.
“I gained and lost my body weight
several times over.
I have suits in every size.”...
...One of his main messages is that overeating
is not due to an absence of willpower,
but a biological challenge
made more difficult by the overstimulating food environment
that surrounds us.
“Conditioned hypereating” is a chronic problem
that is made worse by dieting
and needs to be managed
rather than cured, he said.
- from 'How the Food Makers Capture Our Brains'
Deep down, I love myself.
(Whoa. Just as I typed that the sun came out for the first time in weeks!!)
It's true.
I had wonderful self-esteem when I was little-little.
Then I started to develop a personality of my own, began differentiating myself from my mother and all hell broke loose.
But I remember loving myself.
I remember hurling myself into life with total joy and confidence.
The worst consequence was a skinned knee which was promptly soothed by my doting mother.
I dove on hard services, cushy stuff, mud, grass and people.
I climbed.
I threw my arms around strangers and hugged them.
I performed and paraded with no self-consciousness.
I remember the freedom.
In the past I've written (and haven't we all read plenty of articles) about my wounded "inner child" but which child is that?
What age is she?
My little-little Lisa was happy.
Free.
No cares.
No fears.
Only joy and love.
Deep down she's still in there.
Free.
Loving.
Close to creation.
Curious and joyful.
Then she got covered up.
Avalanched.
Ruined.
I let the world convince me of stuff.
I believed the worst about myself.
I did a helluva job scolding, punishing and abusing my inner little-little.
I've spent years trying to unlearn what I had learned about myself, the falsehoods, inaccuracies and disempowering lies.
Apparently, there's one lie that's putting up a fight as I try to disarm it:
the unGodly (that's not hyperbole. I MEAN un-God-ly) lie that
overeaters are addicts...that I'm an addict,
that my desire to eat is me just "wanting to do whatever I want" without discipline or consequences.
The universe has seen fit to send me a blog troll.
She goes by the names fatgirlonthedancefloor or
M.O.C. and I suspect xyzxyzyz.
I'm finding it difficult to have compassion for her as she lashes out at me (anonymously and therefore cowardly) with more venom each time.
I keep telling myself not to take it personally.
I keep telling myself that she's really just projecting onto me what she hates most about herself.
Unfortunately, what she hates most about herself is her fat body and her addictive personality, sore points for me, sore points she's perfectly willing to poke at as she hides behind her weak anonymity.
Online for the most part, she's hiding behind psuedonyms.
The remnants of her fatgirlonthedancefloor days can be found in snippets from her defunct blog (that still show up in a Google search) and a comment left on a fat-positive blog.
When she was masquerading as M.O.C. she wrote the following on Big Fat Delicious:
and
- I had a scary moment today. I almost drank. I found a wine bottle in the garage and almost drank. It was so close. I am so afraid of losing this precious ...
and
- My fears are hounding me, haunting me. I am overwhelmed by them. All of my waking moments are plagued by my sense of inadequacy, ...
A fat, female, recovering alcoholic with an eating disorder who, as of 2008, is unemployed and is traumatized by shopping due to her size is coming onto my blog, anonymously (?) to take mean-spirited shots at me and my recovery.
(click here and here and here and scroll down to the comments if you're interested)
W T F??
What am I supposed to do with her?
She's being awful, just awful
and yet I have genuine compassion for her since we have such similar issues.
Of course when I lash out I do it as myself.
I speak as me.
All me.
I own my awfulness (which did get me kicked off a Yahoo support group for gastric bypassers... but I did it as ME!)
I re-read her awful comments and they don't fit me well (but they fit me well enough to compel me to re-read them...so there you go).
They fit her.
They must fit her.
We're the only two people involved and I'm the one who has been accountable, candid and has done plenty of changing over the past three years.
She MUST be talking about herself, seeing things in me that her mirror reflects too cuttingly for her to bear.
It's always easier to project our flaws onto someone else and I think that's what she's doing.
I'm doing it now in a way.
I'm calling her out for being critical in a mean spirited way.
Don't I do that with people?
And if I'm not writing it I'm thinking it.
So am I really much better than she is?
She asked (accused is more like it) me if I'd changed in the past three years then she indicated that I was driving the same car and living in the same place.
So?
I live in an adorable garden apartment in a great neighborhood 15 minutes from Manhattan for less than $900 a month. Why would I move?
The car?
It's shit but it gets me where I need to go for now.
I can't raise my material status if I can't raise my head.
Wellness first, other life areas next and they WILL get handled.
Watch me.
She claims I don't take ownership?
Huh?
How many different ways have I admitted my shortcomings?
How many times have I admitted my faults?
I actually blogged the other day about how WRONG I was back when I was ranting about low fat, high fiber diets (click here).
Like DEAD wrong...like oh-shit-how-could-I-have-said-that wrong.
I admitted it publicly, as me, no hiding.
So she HAS to be projecting her faults onto me, right??
sigh
I dunno.
I've attracted a troll who thinks she's an addict and thinks everyone else is an addict too.
My eating Amish sausage and butter seems downright gluttonous to her since she's defined abstinence as low-fat Weight Watchers food.
My lifestyle is an affront to her.
How dare I nourish and care for myself, she thinks.
How dare I treat myself well when really I'm just a weak willed addict (??)
She can't stand that I'm doing something different.
She can't stand that I just might succeed.
The only way she knows how to help herself happens to be the very way she's failed,
so she sees
"failed addict in denial" everywhere she looks.
Yeah, I do a similiar thing.
I now see adrenal fatigue, candida and malnourishment everywhere I look just because that's what I'm working on myself.
She did make me think, though.
She's made me think of how far I HAVE come in the past 3 years,
how much I've learned, grown, changed.
For someone who thinks she's got a fix on me you'd think she would have noticed.
I guess it's more important that I notice
and I do.
*Lisa's Video Pick of the Day*
My critic sounds like a failed 12 Stepper.
Having convinced herself that she's powerless over her substance of choice
she needs to convince herself that she's not alone, that folks like me are in classic
"denial" of our so-called addictions.
Rather than doing the hard work of looking for and correcting the underlying cause of the addictive behavior, folks like her revel in their self-flagellation as they alternate between miserable binge-behavior and miserable "dry drunk" behavior (like lashing out at people anonymously on the internet).
click here or click below
Posts
Needless to say, I too feel your pain. Pants are currently a problem for me. In fact I have two that I rotate...I guess it's a good thing I'm unemployed. I could certainly go and buy more but the prospect of that whole shopping exercise is so depressing and demoralizing that I'm just gonna go with the status quo of my wardrobe. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for stopping by my blog (fatgirlonthedancefloor.wordpress.com)...